My Experience With MTailor

When I first put on the shirt I got from them, I made a comment to my wife…

“This is the most perfectly fitting shirt I’ve ever put on before taking it to a tailor.”

I literally didn’t have a single critique. Nothing.

As you probably know, my father passed away last month. I put on a solid 10 pounds from the stress, so it doesn’t fit me perfectly anymore – as you can see. It fit PERFECT when I received it.

Keep in mind, these aren’t supposed to be $500 shirts you wear a few times per year, making you too scared to even watch them. They’re meant to be perfectly fitting, everyday shirts you can wear to work… out with your friends or to impress girls.

They have everything from 50s to 140s 2-ply, depending on what you want to spend. Plus mother of pearl buttons and 17+ stitches per inch.

To sum it up – they’re damn nice shirts for the money.

I was so impressed, I asked Miles, the founder, for an interview.

Here’s the interview…

Jeremy Question #1: How did you initially come up with the idea for MTailor?

MTailor came out of the frustration I and my cofounder Rafi felt when trying to order clothes online. I order almost everything online, from electronics to food, but clothing is uniquely challenging due to fit. I found going to a store and spending hours trying things on was less frustrating than ordering a bunch of sizes and sending almost everything back.

So Rafi and I set out to create an online clothing experience we’d love. Now, in less than 5 minutes, you can finish your shopping and expect a custom shirt that fits better than anything in your wardrobe. And by cutting out the expensive and time consuming in-person measurement process, we can offer our shirts for 1/2 the price of a typical custom shirt. We wanted an awesome and easy experience that’s also affordable.

Jeremy Question #2: You claim it’s 20% more accurate than an actual tailor. After getting my shirt, I don’t disagree. But can you explain how your technology makes that possible and how you came up with that number?

We brought in 35 people and 4 professional tailors and went head-to-head with the tailors. We came out ahead by 20%.

Tailors have difficulty finding consistent reference points when measuring. For example, tailors have a hard time finding the exact widest part of your hips or exactly where your natural waist lies. This is something our software can do really well, better than a human.

Jeremy Question #3: Now just to make sure I understand correctly, can you better explain the 20% number? Since “fit” is subjective, how did you arrive at 20%? For example did they give you a 1-10 rating for each one, and those who used Mtailor scored it 20% better?

We were really very scientific about the 20% number. We had multiple tailors measure each person. For a given measurement on a given person, we measured the standard deviation across tailors for that measurement on that person. A standard deviation is essentially how much the tailors typically disagree with each other when taking the same measurement on the same person. For a given measurement, we averaged that standard deviation across all 35 people to get a typical standard deviation for all the tailors in that specific measurement. For each person, we then took measurements with the MTailor system and calculated the standard deviation of the MTailor measurement vs. the average of the human tailors. We then averaged this number across all people to get MTailor’s standard deviation for a specific measurement. On average across the 18 measurements we used for the test, MTailor’s standard deviation was 20% smaller than the professional tailors’.

If you talk to a stats person, technically we’re 20% more precise (accuracy and precision have technical meanings).

Jeremy Question #4: Tell us about your actual clothing… what’s special about it?

Because we have a really unique and automatic measurement process, we can be very precise with your measurements. Something most customers don’t know: we account for your shoulder slope (separately on each side).

We’re also really proud of the materials and construction of each MTailor shirt. You can find everything from 50s to 140s 2-ply, all for $89 or less. We use mother of pearl buttons, and we sew over 17 stitches per inch.

Jeremy Question #5: Ever plan on making it possible to order your clothes online, rather than on your phone, after getting initial measurements?

We definitely are! We don’t like rolling out mediocre experiences, so we will push it out when we have something we think is as easy to use as the mobile app.

We are also planning to release an Android version in the near future. That should greatly expand the accessibility of MTailor.

Jeremy Question #6: Any ideas about the future, such as expanding your product line into other areas of clothing?

We want to dress you head to toe in perfect fitting clothing. Shirts are just the beginning. However, we are being slow and deliberate about new product categories, because we want to nail the perfect fit and style before releasing anything to you.

Interested In MTailor? Here’s What To Do…

To learn more about MTailor, I would suggest going to their website. You can also look up “MTailor” in the App Store and download it straight to your phone but I’d recommend checking out the website as well.